ZO’s delivery does everything to bring the party home

After almost a year of scattering sparks along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the ZO restaurant is not allowing itself to stop or take a break. The driving forces (Yaki Kabir and Amir Zarach, with many helping hands around them) are experienced and seasoned enough to understand a few things, to understand very well that they understand nothing, and to remember only one thing — a year here is a decade anywhere else in the world. It’s not scientific, but it’s proven.

Thus, it celebrates itself in a measured fashion, stepping slowly into stormy waters, adding and updating, maintaining an ideal level of stimulation and avoiding overindulgence. A special menu here, special dishes there, Friday already includes a reception that takes Asia to the colorful Middle Eastern taverns, and recently the long-awaited delivery service was added. A green and safe path.

ZO’s restaurant experience is intense and demands preparation, so the take-away (and take-out, there is also self-pickup) translates it home in an excellent way. You don’t always have the energy to go out, and you don’t always have the energy to go out to it, but from your private dining corner and family dining table, many of these barriers disappear automatically. You can dress nicely and put on nice makeup, of course. It’s recommended that you have music and very advisable to pour something for this indulgence, but none of it is mandatory.

For its part, it does everything to bring itself home. The delivery, as a whole, is spectacular — a word rarely written in such contexts. The design is dramatic and practical at once, the ergonomics are impressive, everything is tight and eliminates worry, and even the famous dragon descends a bit from the ceiling onto the boxes, seasoning an experience that often slips into routine with a bit of fireworks and a bit of fire.

The menu, for its part, continues to think big and execute big, leaving behind only a few dishes that wouldn’t enjoy the ride, and making a sincere effort — an effort that also takes place in the restaurant itself, by the way — to make you feel invested in.

It starts with spicy edamame (NIS 42), likely a perfect starter bowl that manages to turn a simple opener into a snatched snack with spicy chili sauce and roasted sesame. With it come four salads — “green wasabi endive,” pan-seared crispy tofu, crispy root vegetables with sweet Asian vinaigrette, and an excellent local version of the Thai papaya salad, NIS 76–78 — large, colorful, and the kind that can fully satisfy a vegetarian meal.

Additional intermediate dishes (dragon ball tiger shrimps, chicken gyoza with ponzu sauce, asado bun and satay chicken skewers, NIS 72–84) and a main course in the form of salmon fillet (NIS 166) will pick up the pace, but it’s good to pause here for a moment and set expectations. There will be namas here, necessarily (and they even hold up respectably in delivery), and there will be sushi here, an obvious necessity, so pay attention.

There is a tight team of sashimi (salmon, tuna, hamachi, NIS 62–74), a larger team of nigiri (tuna, including a “premium” version with foie gras and truffle aioli, hamachi, unagi, salmon and crispy rice with fish tartare, NIS 68–94) and at least a football team, including substitutes, of rolls, so the choice is complex and full of possibilities.

“Spicy tuna” and grilled baked salmon represent more conventional versions of the roll, though they too immediately benefit from good seasoning and a clear sense of precision. Alongside them are vegetarian rolls (crispy zucchini, sweet potato) and rice-less rolls (salmon, tuna, yellowtail, avocado, kanpyo and lettuce wrapped in cucumber with citrus ponzu), as well as tempura and fried delights (shrimp with spicy tuna and tobiko, hamachi with asparagus and kanpyo, salmon skin with avocado and cucumber) that are always welcomed.

The more special dishes reveal slightly different abilities, delicate even. Yellowtail with soy and koji glaze, tuna with finger lime, tartare wrapped in soy sheets, unagi with tamago, and also “rainbow” based on salmon toro, tuna, yellowtail and ikura, which justifies its name with colors and sensations. The prices (NIS 66–96) represent the high end of the city’s scale, but they reward with generous quantity (the rolls are large, cut into eight pieces in most cases, and constitute a truly proper dish, far from the embarrassments around us sometimes) and with significantly higher quality than usual.

Far from the boulevard, far from Don Tran’s bustling kitchen, ZO’s dragon manages to send flames far beyond its own fire zone.

It’s not trivial. Restaurants of this kind usually avoid entering the world of delivery, and give up in advance on dealing with the gap between what happens at their place and what will happen at home. They want control, and they also want you at the bar.

Here, somewhat surprisingly, they established a system and handled both the logistics and the experience, assuming that these two elements need to align with the food. What is not surprising at all, not even relatively, is the execution.